Question 1

What does “cubby” mean?

Accepted Answer

Your room, your flat, the place you go back to — a small word for small quarters, printed in the first dictionary an African American ever published.

Question 2

Where does “cubby” come from?

Accepted Answer

Cubby in this sense is a Harlem word of the late 1930s, and it enters the record through Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary, the glossary of musicians' jive he first compiled in 1938 and reissued through six editions to 1944. The dictionary is generally credited as the first dictionary published by an African American and was accepted by the New York Public Library as its reference for jive. The entry reads Cubby (n.): room, flat, home, and it sits in the same list as pad for bed, domi for an ordinary place to live, and frolic pad for a nightclub — a small vocabulary of shelter belonging to men who worked nights and slept in rented rooms. The word itself is older and broader than Harlem: Green's Dictionary of Slang carries cubby for a small room or space from an 1868 congressional debate and from Huckleberry Finn in 1884, and it survives independently in Australian English. What is specific to Harlem jive is not the shape of the word but the use — cubby as the place that is yours. The misattribution worth correcting is the one Calloway himself corrected. Readers routinely treat the Hepster's Dictionary as a list of words Calloway coined. In the foreword to the 1944 edition he says the opposite: the words are not the figments of his imagination, they were gathered from every conceivable source, and many first saw the light of printer's ink in Billy Rowe's widely read column, The Notebook, in the Pittsburgh Courier. Calloway recorded this vocabulary. He did not invent it, and neither did any one person.